A Selection

A clerk is being tormented by colleagues who shower paper over his head. He says the only thing he says in the whole story on his own behalf: "Leave me alone, why do you torment me?" One young man stops laughing, and hears in it another message: "I am your brother."

That paragraph, written around 1840, seeded a century of Russian literature - the clerks and copyists of the natural school, and the critical tradition from Belinsky to Chernyshevsky that made literature the only available opposition in a country with no parliament and no press.

The selection is generous: two tales from Mirgorod, five St Petersburg stories including The Nose, The Greatcoat and Diary of a Madman, and the whole of The Government Inspector. Christopher English's translation is the best in this series, and genuinely funny, which almost no Gogol translation is.

Its foreword has a hole in it. Belinsky is quoted three times, always in praise. What goes unmentioned is that Belinsky's most famous act was a letter denouncing this author as "proponent of the knout, apostle of ignorance" after Gogol published a defence of serfdom in 1847 - a letter Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for reading aloud.

Progress Publishers, Russian Classics Series, 1980. Translated by Christopher English, The Government Inspector with Gordon McDougall.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.